I just install Reddit official app to see watch they offer. And holy cow. They are selling NFT-like stuff.

Instead make a better app, they give use this.

  • TheBlue22@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Weren’t nft avatars being sold for like months now? I remember them being cyberbullied and banned on mass from 196 (which is extremely funny if you ask me)

  • Rooki@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    They already did such thing with the avatars ( they were buyable and “Marked” as nfts )

      • Anemia@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Jesus christ, having such an avatar would make me delete my account in shame. Especially if it also told people that i was into nfts at the same time.

        • jiji@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Unfortunately it wasn’t just rich idiots, but any idiots with disposable income. Only the rich million-dollar NFT garbage made the news, but plenty of “normal” folk lost money with the junk too.

    • GunnarRunnar@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Kinda don’t see what the big deal is. Probably best use for “unique” goods. Dunno if they use blockchain because as I’ve understood it that’s just a resource hog.

      But selling users unique avatars? Don’t see the appeal and they are fugly and seem dumb but like that’s so inoffensive nothing burger.

      • Destragras@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        The avatars also have a visual effect to them next to comments.

        I think people don’t like this at all not just because NFTs bad, but also because it changes reddit more and more from the website it used to be for commenting on articles & images into crypto social media.

        • Baŝto@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 year ago

          I can’t confirm the visual effect, never saw that on the website. But all NFTs have a hexagonal form, whereas normal avatars have a circle.

  • Tibert@compuverse.uk
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    1 year ago

    Not news. They already did since nfts exploded in popularity. Also they did give away free avatar nfts since then for some events.

  • Lazerbeams2@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    They’ve been doing it a while. They even gave some free ones away to encourage people to buy more. I actually have some of the free ones because why not. I would never pay for them though

  • Rekorse@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I didn’t know about this either. I still cant believe people fall for that nonsense.

    I guess I did buy a bunch of skins in rocket league, is that any different than an nft? I just really like how the cars look lol

    • fearout@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      It’s quite different, and your purchase seems more sensible to me.

      When you buy a skin, you’re buying an asset that you’ll see and use in your game. Sure, it’s just cosmetics, but it’s kinda usable cosmetics. If the game goes down, your skin is probably lost as well, but at least you had some fun with it.

      When you buy an nft, you buy your rights to a link to an image. It’s way more “protected” than simply buying a skin, in a similar way to how owning crypto works. Your right to that link is saved on a blockchain and you become the sole “owner” of that link. You could technically resell it (not sure if it’s allowed on Reddit though), but if a server hosting that image goes down, you’re left owning a broken link.

      And while there’s no other way to get an asset into a game other than to buy it (or mod the game), you could just save an image you like and use it as an avatar anyway, so you’re not even required to buy nfts to use those as an avatar/banner. It’s more of a trading service.

      That technology seems great for proving your rights to some documents or IDs, but it’s still weird to me that people decided to use NFTs for selling link rights to generated jpgs. You don’t even get the licence or usage rights to an image itself, it could be copyright-protected and owned by someone else.

      • Mossy Feathers (She/They)@pawb.social
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        1 year ago

        The thing I don’t get is that, afaik, there’s no real limitation on the size of the nft. To my knowledge there’s nothing stopping you from making a Blockchain that supports full images in each nft. However, instead they decided to sell receipts.

        • fearout@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Mostly because hosting an image within the blockchain would require so much computational power and excess energy usage, that it wouldn’t be profitable even for the most successful scams.

          And I’m not sure whether calculating proof of work for a blockchain that holds images within is even possible using the current algorithms. But I’ve looked at it a while ago, could be that some updated system already exists. But it’s still very much not free, and quite damaging environmentally.

        • magic_lobster_party@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Blockchain is very limited when it comes to storage. Bitcoin for example, is limited to grow by 1MB every 10th minute. That’s 1MB for all users globally. Other blockchains allows for plenty more, but still enough to store entire images.

          The reason why there are limits is because it’s supposed to be possible for anyone to download the entire blockchain to their computer and verify. This is not practical if the blockchain becomes 100TB or so.

      • NotSoMewwo@pawb.social
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        1 year ago

        Fun fact, you don’t even buy the rights to the link. You can make an infinite amount of NFTs that go to the same link. It is a common scam tactic to try and sell duplicated NFTs.

  • eggshappedegg@sopuli.xyz
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    1 year ago

    It’s like they are trying to get rid of users. I had seen the nft on the browser version ages ago but all of this is the reason why we preferred 3rd party browsing experience. Instead of fixing reddit they took that away

    • livus@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Yeah I looked at this screenshot and thought, I don’t know who their target market is, but it’s clearly not me.

      Makes sense they would actively try to drive us away, so all their bandwidth is going to whoever the hell would give them money for these ugly pictures.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I never knew about this and, as others said, they may have been doing this for a while, but I’d say OP still has a point when they said:

    Instead make a better app, they give use this.

    This is the sort of thing they work on instead of their shit app. They’ve had years to improve that app. Longer than NFTs.

    • Reddit_Is_Trash@reddthat.com
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      1 year ago

      They want everyone to use their shitty app so yours forced to see the avatars of other posters, thus subliminally making you want an avatar to “fit in”

      When I used infinity all you saw was the username of who made a post or comment, and the content they posted itself. You don’t need avatars for reddit, its an anonymous website(for now)

          • kautau@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Well yeah, like I said, they (read: spez and tencent) are pursuing quarterly rapid growth over viable long term solutions. But instead they are burning their business

            • danielton@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              And copying and idolizing another guy who doesn’t know what he’s doing at the former birdsite.

              At least Zuck knows when to shut up.

    • Cyyy@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      they did this already for a longer while, yes. that’s why most people stayed away from the offical “app”

    • kautau@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      So many companies do this. Attempting to get quick sales boosts quarter by quarter while avoiding doing anything sustainable because it doesn’t generate instant profit. It’s one of the worst effects of the investor-first way of doing business

  • gunnm@monero.town
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    1 year ago

    This is like their 4th collection, selling them for a while. Crypto Twitter doesn’t care about them.

  • fiat_lux@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    My theory is Musk is trying to bankrupt Twitter quickly so he can minimise his losses, after his impulsive ego finally had some consequences. I think Huffman thinks Musk is a genius and is trying to emulate him by pivoting into crypto, to create his own PayPal style pay day.

    I also don’t think he’s going to be able to create the perpetual motion money machine he’s expecting, but it’s not like he’s going to go personally bankrupt trying. Graphic artists are a cheap labor business expense compared to the potential gain, and at worst you get your own marketplace out of it.

    It would be easy enough to launder cash through such a system that he’ll probably make more money than most will ever own in their lifetime. Even if 99% of it is only ever traded for less than a dollar.

    The question I have is whether he’s competent to keep enough users for a long enough time to buy a personal fortified island or just a personal apocalypse fort.